International abductions by parents rise

Mix of hurdles often hinders those whose kids were taken by an ex who has fled.

By Stewart M. Powell/stewart.powell@chron.com

Published 12:44 am, Tuesday, July 5, 2011

WASHINGTON — For nine gut-wrenching years, Texan Greg Allen has been trying to track down his daughter after her mother absconded to Mexico with the 4-year-old during a rare unsupervised visit after the couple’s contentious divorce.

“When it first happened, I was unable to function,” said Allen, 42, an electrical engineer and sonar expert doing doctoral research at the University of Texas’ applied research laboratories in Austin. “I went from being a single parent whose whole life revolved around raising my daughter to being a left-behind parent whose purpose in life was gone.”

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Last year, at least 1,500 children were unlawfully taken to foreign countries by a parent who had been living in the United States, including children who were taken even while a parent was serving in the U.S. armed forces in Iraq or Afghanistan. Only 578 abducted children were returned to the U.S.

Roughly one-third of the children ended up in Mexico because of the parent’s ties to extended family or Mexico’s proximity.

International parental abductions are “sharply on the rise,” said Ambassador Susan Jacobs, the State Department’s top official on the issue. “When an international border is involved, an already tragic situation for the children and left-behind parents is infinitely compounded.”

Congress’ investigative Government Accountability Office documented at least 6,966 cases of international parental abduction over the decade ending in 2009, most by foreign-born parents returning to their country of birth.

Yet, as Allen learned too late, chronic ambiguities routinely enable parents to abduct their children and get away with it. Local police rarely take missing child reports arising from custody disputes. Customs and Border Protection agents do not check departing parents or children at airports or border crossings. Half of left-behind parents surveyed by the American Bar Association said ex-partners abducted their children during routine court-approved visits.

But federal authorities do not maintain a national database of child custody orders from local courts that might help suspicious immigration officers determine the status of a departing child. Even if the paperwork were available, international airlines routinely have no more than 30 minutes to match a passenger manifest against a missing child report or a court order barring departure.

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International parental abductions

Child abductions are on the rise, according to the State Department’s ambassador on the issue.

6,966 Number of international parental abductions for the 10-year period ending in 2009.

1,500 Minimum number of children unlawfully taken to foreign countries by a parent in 2010.

578 Number of abducted children returned to the United States from past abductions in 2010

1,327 Number of abduction cases from 2007 through 2009 in which the child was taken to Mexico.

3 Number of years a parent can serve in federal prison for abducting a child in a custody dispute

Government Accountability Office; congressional testimony.

Abducting parents can face up to three years in prison for taking their child to a foreign country “with the intent to obstruct a parent’s custodial rights.”

A Texas law taking effect Sept. 1 makes the abduction a state felony as well.

“The reality is, once an abducting parent gets a kid to the departure gate, they’re gone,” said U.S. Rep. Ted Poe, R-Humble, a former criminal court judge and prosecutor who has been working for more than five years to help Houston resident Marty Pate recover his daughter Nicole from Brazil.

Allen, the UT researcher, miraculously spied his daughter Sabrina in Mexico City in 2003 and subsequently visited her school to talk with her teacher. But the girl, now 14, and her mother, Dara Marie Llorens, fled and have not been seen since.

Occasionally, the law catches up to the abductor. In San Antonio last summer, a federal judge sentenced Lynanne Foster, a former University of Texas Health Science Center instructor, to five years’ probation and ordered her to pay her ex-husband $70,665 after pleading guilty to international parental kidnapping.

Foster, formerly a team doctor with the one-time Houston Comets, returned the couple’s daughter, Camille, to ex-husband Galen Kaufman after he had tracked them down in a village in Costa Rica where Foster was living with her new husband and their baby boy. Foster had disappeared in 2008 rather than return Camille to her father after a visit.

In a San Antonio case that got national attention, Jean Paul Lacombe was recorded on security video being pulled off a school bus in October 2009 and handed to his father, who later left the country with the boy and then was indicted on kidnapping and perjury charges.

Last year in France, Lacombe was returned to his mother and came back to San Antonio. The custody dispute is unresolved.

In the 71 nations, such as Mexico, that have signed the 1980 Hague Convention on child abduction, local court proceedings can drag on. The accord is designed to speed repatriation of abducted children younger than 16 to their “country of habitual residence” to resume court-ordered child custody arrangements.

Court proceedings often get sidetracked, particularly in Mexican states engulfed by the drug war such as San Luis Potosí and Tamaulipas.

“We have judges who are afraid to do anything,” said attorney Pamela Brown of Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid in Weslaco, who handles about 20 international child abduction cases a year to and from Mexico. “Judges are terrified that the taking parent might have ties to the cartels, so they won’t step in.”

The Obama administration says it has stepped up efforts to pressure foreign countries to return children. Eight full-time bilingual caseworkers are handling cases involving Mexico, Latin America and Canada. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has named Ambassador Jacobs, a career diplomat, to oversee the effort.

Some parents resort to rescue teams assembled by activists such as Mark Miller, who founded the American Association for Lost Children in 1987. Miller says he has rescued five children from Mexico over the past five years, relying on notarized copies of U.S. custody orders and birth certificates carried by an ad hoc team of drivers, a private investigator, an interpreter and even a person dressed as a priest to help persuade local authorities to cooperate.

“We pick up the child and hurry up back to the border as quickly as possible,” Miller said.

Alarmed by mounting abductions and inadequate cooperation by foreign nations, Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., chairman of a House Foreign Affairs Committee panel that tracks the issue, and eight House colleagues have proposed the International Child Abduction Prevention and Return Act. It would require an annual presidential report on unresolved cases and threaten development assistance and preferential tariffs for nations that demonstrate “a pattern of noncooperation.”